


Unlikely Inheritance

by Griddlebone



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: Female Friendship, Female-Centric, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-12
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-06 08:49:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5410541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griddlebone/pseuds/Griddlebone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What do you do after your entire world falls apart? Find allies where you can and keep on going.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unlikely Inheritance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nikkiscarlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikkiscarlet/gifts).



Shilo woke with a start, flailing around in the dark with no idea where she was. It took everything she had to keep from crying out in fear and desperation – trapped again, under the glass again, part of someone's collection again –

But no, she realized gradually that someone was pounding on the door of her apartment. Hovel. Whatever this was. One room and a working bathroom crammed into a dilapidated high rise that was otherwise more or less empty. Rented with the money she'd got from selling everything – well, almost everything – her father the Repo Man had ever owned, this place was supposed to be secret. No one was supposed to find her here. She was supposed to be _safe_. No more Repo Men, no more Rotti Largos, no more GeneCo, no more schemes and twists and drugs and death.

So who was pounding on her door in the middle of the night?

 _Go away,_ she thought, pulling the ratty blankets tight around her. _Go away, go away, go away._

"I know you're in there."

Damn, damn, damn. She knew that voice. Loved it, hated it, knew it.

Like a moth drawn to the flame, she could not resist. In a trance she went to the door and opened it.

She wasn't mistaken. He was there. _He_ : the graverobber.

But he wasn't alone. Instinct screamed. Slam the door! This cannot be happening!

Shilo stood where she was, clinging to the door, looking from Graverobber to the sobbing mess of a woman that huddled on the floor at his feet. She almost didn't recognize that woman as Amber Sweet.

What are you doing here? How did you find me? Why is _she_ here? All the questions died away in Shilo's throat at one look from Graverobber.

 _That can't be your real name,_ she thought idly, and, _Why are you doing this? I wish you would leave me alone_.

But he didn't leave her alone, wouldn't. Not yet. "Take her," he said. "She's all yours."

She stumbled over words, halfway between _what are you talking about_ and _I don't want her_. What she finally said was, "How did you find me?"

"I can find anything," he assured her. Of course. The man robbed graves for a living, sucking the Zydrate right out of the corpses with that syringe-thing of his. He could find all the right dead bodies. Why not the right living one?

Shilo felt numb inside.

"I need someone to take her off my hands for a while," Graverobber went on.

"So you thought of me?" The numbness had turned prickly.

"Couldn't think of any place safer."

The words were a stab through her heart. Of course he didn't feel the same nervous, fluttery anticipation she did. He cared about other things. Like money. And Zydrate. And fucking Amber Sweet.

"Fine," she bit out, though her skin crawled at the idea of letting goddamn Amber Sweet into her haven.

He hauled Amber to her feet, and Shilo noted that at least she'd stopped crying and seemed to be aware of where she was. Shilo simply stood to the side and let him deal with wrangling Amber inside. She would deal with this, but that didn't mean she had to help him. She had second thoughts about that decision as he dumped Amber straight into _her_ bed, but it was too late now.

"Happy now?" she asked, leering angrily from the shadows almost behind the door. It didn't feel like she belonged in this place anymore. Not with Amber in it.

"Look, kid," he said, and his voice was weirdly gentle and she didn't like the sound of that one bit. "I know you don't like her. I get it. She's a bitch. But you started this. You're gonna have to finish it."

"Started this?" she repeated. He brushed past her on his way out and did not answer and did not look back. She followed him into the hall, shouting after him for all the good it did her. Damn that man, always popping into her life to mess things up and then vanishing as soon as the going got tough. "How the hell did I start this?" she asked the empty hall with its flickering lights, but no one answered.

Amber was waiting for her when she finally came back in, sitting on the bed looking exhausted and worn. Shilo closed the door, watching warily. She had skin on her face again. Shilo had seen the photos from the Genetic Opera when Amber had lost her face – literally. Something was off about her now, about the way her tears had dried and hadn't even had the decency to smudge her makeup. About the way she watched Shilo.

It was like she wasn't high.

Was Amber Sweet ever not high? Shilo didn't think she'd ever seen her sober before.

"You must really hate me, huh," Amber said quietly. It wasn't really a question; they both knew the answer.

"Why are you here?" Shilo demanded.

"I need your help." It sounded like it might kill her to say that. Whatever she wanted, she must want it badly if she was here.

"What do you want, then?" she amended. The sooner she gave Amber what she wanted, the sooner she could disappear again. She'd find a new place to hide, a better place, where no one would ever find her…

"I want GeneCo."

"So take it."

"Can't. Daddy's will said it was yours. Need you to sign off on it before my brothers tear each other apart trying to get it," Amber explained.

Shilo watched her for a while, trying to figure out if she was serious.

"Look, you don't want it. I do. Let's make this work for both of us."

Shilo didn't trust this woman one bit, but damn if she wasn't tempted. The specter of GeneCo had loomed over her head since the night of the Genetic Opera, when Rotti Largo had tried to will GeneCo to her instead of his children. It was why everyone was always looking for her, why she'd holed up in this dump in the first place. Better to hide than to deal with the biggest problem that had dropped on her head that night.

What would GeneCo look like with Amber Sweet at its head?

"I need to think about it."

"Take your time."

She couldn't help it. "There's something different about you. What's going on?"

Amber laughed softly. "Weird, right? I'm sober, kid. Let the surgeons put new skin on my face, and I haven't touched the Z since. Except, well…"

That explained how she'd ended up with Graverobber, more or less, and why she'd been crying. And, grudgingly, Shilo could admit that was probably why Graverobber had brought her here. Shilo didn't like her one bit, but she was also the last person in the world that would indulge Amber's habit. Strange, that he hadn't welcomed Amber back with open arms.

Instead he'd brought her someplace he felt was safe. It seemed creepily like he wanted Amber to stay sober.

Shilo was never going to understand that man. But if Amber was sober, if she was trying to change for the better… Shilo bit down on the sensation of hope that rattled in her chest. _Stop that. Nothing good is ever real. Nothing good ever lasts. Amber will fuck this up if you give her half a chance._

There was no furniture in the room except the bed, so Shilo sat on the floor. "Let's talk about GeneCo."

 

In the end Shilo signed the papers. Every single one. She gave all of GeneCo over to Amber Sweet, and only later discovered to her surprise that one of the multitude of documents she'd signed gave her a monthly income out of the company's profits. A hefty income, more than enough to live on. That was a nice touch, she had to admit.

She spent months waiting for Amber to ruin what was left of the world, but it didn't happen. Neither did the change Amber had promised. GeneCo continued as it always had, and everyone went on with life as if the Genetic Opera had never happened.

Shilo supposed sourly that it was only really her world that had fallen apart that day. Nobody else needed to care. So they didn't. They had their own problems to worry about. And that was exactly what they did.

So Shilo went back to the business of living. It wasn't hard, not when she had what remained of her inheritance from her father and her monthly stipend from GeneCo. She could do whatever she wanted, whatever that was. Most often it involved tracking down and purchasing books. Old books, rare books, books from before the epidemic that killed most everyone. More books than her father had ever let her read, and not just the ones about insects, though there were plenty of those. And she bought things, too. Other things. Like furniture for her apartment. Because Amber had been right about one thing at least: no one bothered her now. No one looked for her now that she didn't maybe own GeneCo.

She didn't need to disappear. She already had.

 

She wasn't expecting to ever see Amber again once the papers were signed. But she turned up one night more than six months later and had the courtesy to do it without her usual retinue of burly, barely-dressed bodyguards. When Shilo asked why, Amber handed her a newspaper. It reminded Shilo uncomfortably of their first encounter, in that back alley with the Zydrate addicts when she found out that Blind Mag was going to die.

Only this newspaper bore a headline that startled Shilo into silence: _GeneCo CEO Amber Sweet Orders End of Organ Repossession._

Finally: "You did this?"

Amber smiled that disconcerting smile of hers. "Changing a company the size of GeneCo takes time," she said. "And a lot of work. More than I thought it would. But…" Her voice got very small. Or as small as Amber's voice ever got. "I'm trying. I wanted to make sure you knew."

Graverobber's words came back to her: _You started this. You're gonna have to finish it._

This thing that Amber had done… "You did this for me, didn't you?"

"You gave me what I wanted. Nobody made you do it, but you did. I…" She almost grimaced. "And for some reason I wanted to repay you."

Coming from Amber Sweet, it sounded downright _wrong_. Something on her face must have betrayed what she was thinking, because Amber barked a laugh.

She sat down beside Shilo on her too-nice new couch. "Look, kid," she said. "You could have left me a tabloid tragedy and you didn't. You had every reason to grind me down into the gutter like everyone else, and you picked me up instead. Even when I was trying to drag myself back there… when you knew I was probably just going to fuck everything up, you gave me the chance to fuck it all up anyway."

Shilo felt frozen. How was she supposed to react to something like that?

Her first thought was to take a shot at this woman, this horrible woman who had actually made herself vulnerable just now. Amber Sweet was just shy of being a monster. She'd deserve it.

And she couldn't do it.

"I hated him for dragging me to you. I'd never been so pissed off in my life," Amber went on. Shilo wondered about that – Amber had been infamous for her tantrums – but kept her mouth shut. It was _weird_ listening to Amber Sweet talk like she was a real person and not just something almost human that had been cobbled together through too many surgeries.

"Who the hell was he to tell me I couldn't have my fix? I had the damn money, and he brought me here anyway." That explained why she'd been such a mess, at least. "But he was right, damn him," Amber admitted. "I needed you."

"Uh, you're welcome," Shilo said awkwardly. She didn't have a clue what to say. It would have been so much easier to just never see Amber again.

"I'm tryin' to thank you, kid." Amber's voice was sharp as a scalpel. Gratitude didn't come easy to one who had spent her whole life having everything handed to her. Apparently.

"Then you should have just said it."

Amber ignored the acid in Shilo's voice. "I never had a friend before, you know," she murmured. "Kinda think if things had been different, maybe…"

Shilo had never had a friend before, either. Maybe that was why neither of them could trust anyone.

She briefly entertained the ridiculous thought that if they couldn't trust anyone else, then maybe they ought to try trusting each other.

Amber's expression softened. "Can we at least be not enemies?"

Maybe Shilo could deal with that.

 

If Amber's visits became more frequent after that, neither of them brought it up. At least not to each other. It was just a thing that happened. Running into each other was a perfectly natural part of being not enemies. It wasn't like Amber was going out of her way to visit. And it _definitely_ wasn't like they were seriously considering being friends or anything.

And Shilo said as much one day, when she was walking down the street on the way to a new bookstore she'd discovered and happened to see a familiar face along the way. "Amber Sweet wants to be _my friend_ ," she said, without any other explanation.

The graverobber grinned in that asshole way of his. Like he knew so damn much. Like he just did things for fun and what happened afterward was just some kind of happy, unintentional accident. "That a problem?" he asked.

Shilo sat down next to him, on more or less clean pavement instead of the garbage-covered gutter where he was lounging. "What do you get out of this?" she asked. "You wanted her to stay sober. You didn't want her to go back to being an addict. It doesn't make any sense."

"Sure it does," he told her. "Got her off my back, didn't it?"

Shilo wasn't convinced. Sitting so near to him, she wondered what it would be like to be as open and demanding as Amber, to tell him exactly what she wanted and then demand that he give it to her. Even as she thought it, she knew it was never going to happen. However she felt about this man, she didn't really want to be a part of his world. He was intriguing and endlessly fascinating, but the things he did and the people he knew horrified her.

Better to focus on other things. "Did you know what she planned to do?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I knew what she said, and what she's done before. Didn't really know what she would do once she found you, but I couldn't stand the crying anymore. Or the pissing and moaning."

He acted like he didn't care at all. About either of them. Shilo wondered if that was how he really felt, or if it was an act for her benefit.

"She's not that bad, you know," he went on. "Once you get used to her."

"She could be a lot worse, so that makes her… good?"

"Now you've got it."

Infuriating man. Shilo surprised herself by standing up and storming off without another word. She didn't need this. But as she walked, she gradually, grudgingly, came around to the realization that he was at least partially right. Amber Sweet was pretty damn awful. But she was also trying to be less awful.

She was actually trying damn hard to be less awful and to change the world for the better. Which was more than Shilo was doing, hiding in her little hole and pretending she wasn't part of the world.

"Damn," she sighed, though there was no one to hear but herself. "I guess we'll try being friends, then."

 

It wasn't easy to trust, not after everything Shilo had been through. Everyone in her life had used and betrayed her, except maybe the graverobber. And now, she supposed, Amber Sweet.

It wasn't easy for Amber, either. No one had ever taken her seriously before, although that was starting to change. Based on a steady stream of advice from Shilo, she was starting to make some real changes at GeneCo, beyond just large flashy proclamations like the official end of organ repossession. And that included inviting Shilo to help her with some of the trickier problems that faced the company, like the way customers obtained funding for their surgeries.

Shilo hated the feeling that she was being sucked back into the corrupted trap that was GeneCo, but Amber assured her that she could walk away whenever she wanted. No questions asked.

"Why me?" she asked, exasperated.

"I need someone I can trust."

It still sounded _weird_ to hear something like that in Amber's voice, but Shilo was getting used to it. She didn't feel prickly inside about it anymore. In fact, she almost believed it. "I think it's a bad idea."

"That's why I need you!" Amber sounded almost eager now even as the old whine wormed its way back into her voice. Or desperate, Shilo realized. "You'll tell me the truth even if it's not what I want to hear. Nobody else will do that."

Shilo wanted more than anything to run screaming away from this proposal. But… Amber was asking for her help. Friends helped each other, didn't they?

The thought of turning herself over to Amber, of going back to GeneCo, churned her gut. She didn't want to. This was the last thing she ever wanted to do. But Amber was asking for her help. And this was Shilo's chance to actually do something good. Maybe even to start making up for some of the horrors her father had inflicted.

"If you don't want to, you don't have to," Amber assured her. "I said no questions asked, and I meant it."

Shilo knew she shouldn't do it, hated the thought of trusting another person with her life and her safety and, and, and. Every time she'd trusted someone, almost every single time, they'd betrayed her in the end. The last time she'd taken a chance to change her life, it had shattered her world. It would probably happen again. She shouldn't…

But Amber hadn't betrayed her yet.

So she said, "I'll do it."

 

In the end, Amber Sweet was nothing like Shilo had assumed she would be. Shilo was actually happy to find out she'd been wrong, though she would never ever admit that out loud. Especially not to Amber.

Amber was still mildly awful even now, years after the graverobber first dumped her in Shilo's little apartment on that fateful night. She was still plenty spoiled and entitled, and she probably would never be able to fully move past that. It was too much a part of who she was.

But she was still trying to be better.

She was still trying to be more.

She was still trying to change the world.

And there was something about that Shilo could respect, even trust.

Looking at Amber now, sprawled comfortably on Shilo's couch in that same hole-in-the-wall apartment as she flipped through a new fashion magazine, in a rare moment of quiet in an otherwise busy life, Shilo could hardly believe there was a time when they weren't friends. The Genetic Opera was ancient history now, and though a part of that day would always remain fresh in Shilo's memory, she had made so many new discoveries and new memories since then. And most of them involved Amber.

Whining, cajoling, selfish Amber. Amber, with her unexpected sense of humor and her surprisingly savvy intelligence. Amber, the first person who had been willing to trust Shilo. Who had somehow earned Shilo's trust in return. Who had convinced her to return to the world and made sure that she came back in one piece. Who still gave her specimens of fascinating new insects whenever she could get her hands on them. And considering how wealthy she was, that turned out to be pretty often.

After all this time it no longer even felt strange to relax around Amber. They coexisted quite nicely, reassured and relaxed just from a few minutes in the presence of that other trusted person. It was like a balm on the open wounds where Shilo's heart had been. And it was what Amber needed to recharge before going back out there to face the mess that was her company again.

Theirs had been a rocky start, for sure. Shilo was almost surprised that they'd put up with each other long enough to let their guard down. But they'd been different people then. Amber had been even more selfish and entitled and demanding, but trying to change. Shilo had been frightened and sick and wanting nothing more than to hide forever and ever. But underneath two very different exteriors they had been the same: lonely and scared, starving for real trust and love in a disgusting, cutthroat world.

How strange that they had found what they needed in each other.

Shilo's sanctuary had become Amber's, too, for all that it was far less fine than she was used to. It was quiet, almost peaceful. And though she'd once resented the intrusion, Shilo could admit she was happier now when Amber stopped by. This place was secret and safe and _theirs_.

She would never say it out loud, but Shilo liked to imagine this was what it would be like to have an older sister. A best friend. The kind of thing she'd only ever read about in books.

One day she would have to thank the graverobber for all of this. She laughed out loud because the thought was so ridiculous. Amber looked at her, quirking a brow in a gesture that was not obnoxious but knowing. Shilo shook her head. _It's nothing._

It was nothing, and everything.

She wondered where he was now, and if he knew just how much he had changed her life and Amber's for the better. She hoped he did.


End file.
